Artemis, CAPSTONE, and NEA Missions into the Lunar System: Status and Future Plans of Landing and Exploring the Moon

The Artemis I mission launch on November 16th has given the programme a huge boost. The moon rocket was cobbled together from previous rockets and was sent to see how it would fare in the hostile environment of space. The second Artemis mission should fly around the Moon no earlier than 2024, this time with astronauts on board. The third mission will land people on the Moon — including the first woman and the first person of colour.

NASA and the European Space Agency collaborated to build an uncrewed test flight to see how the capsule holds up under heavy space loads. Hu said: “We have seen really good performance across the board.”

There are various small problems that engineers are attempting to fix, such as the occasional problems with the star- tracking system that is probably due to damage from space radiation, and the electrical system that takes power from the four solar panels to the capsule.

Images from the journey so far show Orion glimmering in reflected sunlight in deep space, occasionally with Earth appearing as a pale blue dot in the distance, or with the Moon as a looming grey presence. NASA has also released pictures of the capsule’s interior, where a mannequin known as a moonikin watches over control panels and a small stuffed Snoopy toy floats around as an indicator of zero gravity. Flight director Judd Frieling, also at Johnson Space Center, said that more video footage would be released soon, and that a low-resolution livestream from Orion is now available whenever communication bandwidth allows.

The Artemis I launch also carried ten small satellites into space, most of which have scientific missions. Of those, eight have been reported to have established communications with controllers after launch. One of them, a miniature Japanese Moon landers named, was declared lost after tumbling out of control. There are two people whose status is not known, one is a solar sail that will fly past an asteroid. The Scout NEA mission successfully deployed after the Artemis I launch, but has not been heard from since.

Separately, a small spacecraft called CAPSTONE, which launched from Earth in June and encountered some problems in September, entered its own lunar orbit on 13 November. The path is being used by a future NASA lunar station known as Gateway.

The success of NASA’s new moon mission on Sunday has taken the agency one step closer to having US astronauts on the moon in five years.

Descent into the ocean: NASA’s mission to test the heat shield against the “searing heat of entry” and launch of the Artemis 1 mission

The capsule performed a “skip entry” descent where it dipped in and out of the atmosphere to slow down the vehicle before re-entry. This type of descent will provide data for splashdown sites for future crewed missions, NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said on NASA’s live stream on Sunday.

“Watching it from the deck as an observer, we saw those three full main parachutes pop out,” said NASA spokesperson Derrol Nail, speaking from the USS Portland several miles from the splashdown site. It was just a few hundred feet in the sky and we could see the slow descent of the module as it descended to the ocean.

The navy boat was waiting for the ammonia to come out and was allowed to remain on shore for as long as two hours. Ammonia, lethal to humans when exposed to high levels, is used for the crew module’s cooling system, which is crucial for future crewed missions, Nail said.

A key part of the descent was to test the spacecraft’s heat shield against the “searing heat of entry” where temperatures built up to around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit around Orion, Navias said. That’s half as hot as the outer surface of the sun.

The launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission aims to rekindle the spirit of Apollo a half century after the United States left the lunar surface. Science is the least of the forces that are driving.

Delays are not out of the equation as seen in the months leading up to the capsule launch. The Artemis 1 mission was delayed for several months because of an engine issue, a liquid hydrogen leak and a storm. The mission launched in late November.

Astroparticle Science: A Re-launch of the Apollo Apollo I Mission and the Discovery of Mars for Human Exploration and Planet-Building

The moon program named after Apollo’s twin sister is designed to revive some of the glory from NASA’s previous moon landing missions. An estimated 600 million people tuned in to watch the Apollo 11 landing in July 1969, when Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon.

For most of the eight billion people now on Earth, the Apollo era is legend; the main significance of the photograph of a ‘blue marble’ Earth taken from Apollo 17 is as one of the default iPhone wallpapers. The Artemis I mission was launched last month, and it appears that NASA intends to come back to the glory days of Apollo. Humanity is about to make a giant leap again. But to what end?

NASA wants to have astronauts land in the moon with the help of a human landing system and a capsule from the space agency. The contract with Musk’s company is worth nearly $3 billion.

There are many reasons behind the renewed push, with the most important of which being the sort of science that motivated Schmitt. Politics and technology are relevant again. The Artemis project is so expensive that members of Congress are allowing NASA to get small budget increases for it. Public enthusiasm for space exploration has been brought about by new ways of delivering it, as well as by the rise of powerful private companies. NASA has contracted SpaceX to deliver Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface using the enormous Starship, with which Musk dreams of colonizing Mars.

“We’re paving a way to go on to not just the moon and Mars, but to establish a presence in our solar system beyond our home planet — to explore, to have those technologies in space, and to continue to learn and improve things here on planet Earth,” he said.

It was already clear that this would be the last Apollo mission when they blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center. But few anticipated that, 50 years on, human exploration of space would be confined to low Earth orbit. Apollo 17 still marks the last time boots crunched into the soil of an alien world; the last time astronauts skipped joyously in the Moon’s low gravity; the last time anyone directly witnessed Earth’s blue globe rising above the grey lunar horizon.

As Cernan and Schmitt guided their lunar module into the narrow Taurus–Littrow valley, each had a personal mission. Cernan was looking to gain the status of Moon-walker, which he had just missed in 1969 as lunar-module pilot on Apollo 10, the practice run for Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s successful landing with Apollo 11 a couple of months later.

There was only one professional astronomer who walked on the Moon. He believed that humans could do better science than the robot landers and advocated that NASA continue the Apollo programme. The Moon’s ancient rocks, much less erased by tectonics than those of Earth, could hold the key to a new understanding of the Solar System.

Then, late on 14 December, they parked the rover with its television camera pointing at the lander, to broadcast their departure. They left a plaque that read, in part, “Here man completed his first explorations of the moon, December 1972, A.D.”. After the greatest human voyage ever, deep-space exploration just — stopped.

There were reasons in the shifting sands of politics. The Apollo programme was brought rousingly to life by US president John F. Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the Moon” speech in September 1962, when he promised that there would be US boots on the lunar soil by the end of the decade. It was a geopolitical prestige project, a response to the country falling behind in the cold war space race. In 1957, the Soviet Union had launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. It had also put the first man into orbit — Yuri Gagarin in 1961, just the previous year.

Money and attention began to move to a different place. NASA launched the Skylab space station in 1973, and fired the boosters on its space-shuttle programme. It aimed to establish a permanent human presence in space — but a few hundred kilometres up, not roughly 400,000 kilometres away on the Moon. Cold war cooperation has a rare symbol of space. The United States and the Soviet Union orchestrated an in-orbit handshake in 1975, which involved astronauts meeting cosmonauts. The two had begun a permanent cohabitation in the space station when it launched in 1998.

Things have stayed there in Earth’s low Earth orbit. Members of Congress have kept alive dreams of a US return to deep space by funnelling funds to their districts for aerospace jobs. But the inertia has never been fully regained. On the twentieth anniversary of Apollo 11, George W. Bush announced his plans to go back to the Moon and on to Mars. This ended four years later, the absence of a space race depriving it of great political support. In 2004, George W. Bush tried again with a more modest proposal for lunar exploration. That came a year after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, killing its crew of seven and signalling the beginning of the end for the shuttle programme. NASA started to build new moon rockets after Bush’s plan got enough traction, but Barack Obama stopped the programme because it was too expensive.

Then, the cycle was broken. Republican space- policy advisers crafted a plan to return astronauts to the Moon during Donald Trump’s presidency. The programme was named after the Greek goddess of the Moon, Artemis, and was championed by NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. For whatever reason, Joe Biden kept it on when he became president in 2021.

To be sure, there are renewed scientific imperatives to return to the Moon. The frozen water on the lunar surface was discovered by researchers in the 1990s, showing that it wasn’t as dry as was thought. That water could reveal secrets of the Solar System’s history – as well as being one thing we wouldn’t have to transport to a permanent lunar base.

Some people don’t believe Artemis is fit for purpose. The agency could move more quickly andnimbly in its partnerships with aerospace companies, according to critics such as the former NASA deputy administrator. Many would prefer NASA to forget deep space and spend more time and money on Earth, including space-based climate monitoring. Some people disagree with the idea of the government focusing not on the space race, but on Earth-bound problems such as civil rights.

What permanent significance that will have is anyone’s guess. It means that we are finally returning to some of the wonders of human space exploration after half a century. We are once again seeing live streams from lunar orbit — not from a robotic orbiter, but from a capsule that is steered remotely by humans and will one day carry them. We are seeing the pale blue dot of Earth, in the cold depths of interplanetary space, in real time, contextualizing our fragile presence on a vulnerable planet. These might be smaller steps for humankind than we originally thought, but they are still steps.

NASA will fly to a metal world, a crew will join the moon mission, and several new commercial rockets may make their launch debut.

More stunning discoveries, climate missions, the selection of the first astronauts to go to the moon, and innovative developments with the X-59 and X-57 are some of the things that will tell us more about the Earth.

The European Space Agency mission, which launches from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, is set to explore Jupiter and three of its icy moons.

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The space agency has already narrowed down its astronaut corps to a field of 18 hopefuls that are eligible for Artemis crew assignments. NASA said at the time that they would announce the Artemis II crew in early 2023, so the news could come any day now.

The program depends on partnerships with more than a dozen companies that are private developers of their own lunar landers.

The first lander built by Astrobotic could be the one that flies under the program and carries 11 science and exploration instruments with it. The crater is on the near side of the moon.

It is thought that the oceans of all three moons are covered in ice and scientists want to find out if they are possible to live in.

Once it reaches Jupiter in July 2031, the spacecraft and its suite of 10 instruments will conduct 35 flybys of the gas giant and its moons. Some of the mission’s goals include investigating whether life ever existed in the Jupiter system, how the gas giant shaped its moons and how Jupiter itself formed.

The Starliner is expected to round out NASA’s plans to hand over the task of transporting astronauts to the ISS to the private sector. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is already taking up that task, and the company aims to launch its seventh routine astronaut mission next month. When Starliner enters operations, SpaceX and Boeing are expected to divvy up the missions, with the hope of keeping as much staff on the ISS as possible before NASA retires the aging space station in the next decade.

Continuing one of the most notable trends in spaceflight of the 2020s, some new commercial rocket companies are expected to debut brand-new launch vehicles that are entirely owned and operated by the private sector.

The first launch of the gargantuan Starship is expected to be attempted by SpaceX. The company wants to one day use the vehicle to put the first humans on Mars, and NASA is also hoping to rely on the vehicle for its Artemis program.

Two powerful commercial rockets are being developed, one by United Launch Alliance and the other by Blue Origin. The New Glenn rocket is likely to make its flight debut sometime in the second half of the next decade. New rockets are notoriously bad for schedule slips.

Several new smaller rockets are designed to haul lightweight satellites into Earth’s orbit. The first launches for two US based companies could be from Florida and Alaska.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/05/world/space-missions-2023-scn/index.html

Status of OSIRIS-REx: a new mission to study the Asteroids in our Solar System and other Asteroid Belts

OSIRIS-REx will swing by Earth on September 24 and drop the sample, containing 2.1 ounces of material from the surface of Bennu, at the Utah Test and Training Range. If the spacecraft is still in good health, it will then start on a new expedition to study other asteroids.

The samples will reveal information about the formation and history of our solar system, as well as asteroids that may be on an eventual collision course with Earth.

The Psyche mission will go to an unexplored potato shaped world in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The mission will study a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche, which only appears as a fuzzy blur to ground and space-based telescopes.

The object may be a leftover metal core from a planet or something that was never melted, according to NASA. Psyche could help astronomers learn more about the formation of our solar system. If Psyche truly is a core, studying it would be like peering inside the very heart of a planet like Earth.

The original launch window for the mission was missed due to testing delays. The mission team is staffing more to test before the launch.

A variety of other missions are expected to launch in 2023. NASA’s Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution mission, or TEMPO, will measure pollution hourly over North America.

The European Space Agency, as well as the JapanAerospace Exploration Agency will work together to investigate X-ray objects.

The European Space Agency will work with NASA on the project to explore dark energy, a mysterious form of energy that drives the rapid expansion of the universe.

The ASTHROS mission is going to launch a balloon larger than a football field to study what causes star formation to end in some galaxies.